Just what is the best browser for use in NetSuite?
The other day a customer asked me this question and I gave my usual response based on the feeling I get while using various NetSuite instances. Normally I feel Chrome is fastest, and Internet Explorer slowest with others falling in between. Firefox is my usual choice as Chrome has some known issues (we won’t call them bugs) with NetSuite. Safari also seems to hold up well in the speed department as a few NetSuite users I follow on twitter keep raving about it and I found it fairly snappy as well.
Just for kicks I decided to do a rather unscientific test of 4 different browsers and use the built in NetSuite performance reporting to figure out which were fastest and which were slowest. The results were surprising. In fact, I re-ran my scenario multiple times to see if there had been some mistake.
The Scenario
My test was very simple, mainly because I don’t know how to automate the testing and get page load times for multiple browsers using some kind of super plugin. I ran the test 3 or 4 times and used the times I got most frequently, as opposed to averaging. This to ensure that my connection wasn’t the issue. In all cases I got 3 results that were very close for each page. All tests were done on my Windows XP SP3 Desktop.
I admit that this is rather unscientific and I haven’t removed certain variables and I encourage others to try the same thing and report on the results here.
